The Attack on Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, more than 2,300 U.S. military personnel were killed, more than 1,100 were wounded, and eight battleships were damaged or destroyed when the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was, in the words of U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The attack, orchestrated by Japanese Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, was as much of a tactical success as it was a strategic failure. The U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were all at sea and thus escaped harm, and the overwhelming majority of the ships damaged on December 7 were repaired and returned to duty. While the USS Arizona was completely destroyed and the Oklahoma capsized (these two ships accounted for roughly two-thirds of American casualties), recovery of the remaining ships was aided by numerous factors. Pearl Harbor has an average depth of just 45 feet (13.7 meters), meaning that many ships that were “sunk” were resting with their decks well above the waterline, and the harbor’s shipbuilding and dry dock facilities were largely unscathed. In addition, the extensive oil-storage facilities on the island were not treated as a high priority by Japanese planners, who focused on military rather than logistical targets. Had these crucial forward-deployed fuel reserves been destroyed, the war-making capacity of the Pacific Fleet would have been severely hampered. U.S. Adm. Chester Nimitz stated that the destruction of the oil tanks “would have prolonged the war another two years.”

It is often forgotten, but the attack on Pearl Harbor was just one element of a larger Japanese offensive that was unfolding that day. On December 8 (local time—the following locations are on the other side of the International Date Line), several hours before the first planes were sighted over Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began an amphibious invasion of Malaya; by that evening, the Japanese had established a strong beachhead and had devastated the Royal Air Force’s offensive capability in the area. Japanese bombers from Formosa struck U.S. airfields in the Philippines, destroying more than half of the U.S. Army’s aircraft in the Far East and wiping out the largest contingent of B-17 Flying Fortresses outside the continental United States. Japanese bombers launched from the Marshall Islands targeted the American garrison on Wake Island as the prelude to a land invasion (the repulse of an initial amphibious assault on December 11 was the first tactical defeat suffered by the Japanese navy in World War II). British air power in Hong Kong was destroyed by a Japanese air raid, and Japanese land forces invaded Thailand. Air raids on Guam preceded an invasion that the island’s meager defensive units were ill equipped to repel; American forces surrendered on December 10. In Shanghai, the gunboats USS Wake and HMS Peterel (U.S. and British flagged, respectively) presented the only obstacles to Japanese occupation of the city’s International Settlement. The Peterel was sunk by Japanese fire after a spirited but ultimately futile defense, while the Wake’s skeleton crew was overwhelmed by a Japanese boarding party; it was the only U.S. Navy ship to be captured during World War II.

These successes were entirely in keeping with Yamamoto’s appraisal of the situation in the Pacific prior to hostilities. “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.” (This is likely the inspiration for the apocryphal “sleeping giant” quote commonly attributed to Yamamoto.) Indeed, almost exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, the tide would permanently turn in the Pacific at the Battle of Midway. Yamamoto’s sweeping, excessively complex battle plans, which had served him well in December 1941, would prove to be his undoing at Midway. American naval pilots, aided by decrypted Japanese communications and no small amount of luck, destroyed Japan’s first-line carrier force and effectively deprived Japan of the ability to prosecute an offensive war in the Pacific.